normally reluctant to engage themselves in agricultural lending. To pro-tect themselves, banks should carefully match the maturity of their loans
with that of their loanable resources and apply measures to protect their
loan portfolio from potential risk losses.
Additional risk protection measures that present added costs to borrowers include insurance coverage against insurable risks such as specified adverse weather events leading to crop damage (as noted above) or
insurance against fire (buildings and crops) and theft (movable assets).
Government or donor-financed loan guarantee schemes, in general, have
not led to significantly increased bank lending (additionality) and they
should be carefully designed in order to secure appropriate risk management and sharing as well as a cost effective administration. On the
other hand, mutual guarantee associations have proven their usefulness.
Banks also control their financial exposure by limiting their loans to
only a portion of the total investment costs and by requiring that the
borrower engages sufficient equity capital as well as by a careful diversification of their loan portfolio in terms of lending purposes, market
segments and loan maturities. It is worth underlining that successful
(micro) financial institutions operating in rural areas, especially densely
populated rural areas, do not concentrate their portfolio in agriculture
to the exclusion of non-farm activities. This is because portfolio diversification is a key to sustainability and successful risk management.
Group lending is discussed below.
LOAN COLLATERAL